WHAT We Do

MISSION: Our Mission is to find and aid people in distress and to assist law enforcement agencies with evidence searches.

Our Goal is to provide tracking/trailing, air scent and specialty search dog teams trained for effective and efficient canine search in support of the King County Sheriff’s Special Operations Unit for search operations in the following areas:

Missing persons search in wilderness and urban settings.

Assisting with the location of drowning victims.

Locating deceased victims.

Locating articles of evidence at a crime scene.

Locating victims in rubble in case of fire or natural disasters.

Locating victims after an avalanche.

KCSD complements and extends police K9 resources but our training and certifications focus on searching for missing persons and specialty searches so we DO NOT:

We enjoy what we do and welcome you to learn more by browsing our website to discover more details on the different search disciplines (airscent, trailing and specialty search) as well to find out more about KCSD and its members. We also hope you will visit the YOU can help section to learn how to stay safe in the wilderness and what you can do to help our mission.

News & Announcements

Did You Know?

How dogs use scent to find us? Research suggests we all produce a unique set of smells as we breathe, sweat and shed skin cells (up to 40,000 per minute). We all leave behind an olfactory cloud of chemicals, debris and the microbial biome that inhabits our skin as we walk. Our genetics and lifestyle both contribute to our unique olfactory footprint such that dogs can even distinguish between identical twins! Trailing dogs discriminate between people based on our unique chemical signatures; combinations of volatile chemicals we emit and microbial breakdown of the cells we shed. Airscent and avalanche dogs use the same process but are taught to search for the common ‘human’ smells rather than a subject’s unique smell.

Almost 1/8 of a dog's brain and over half of its internal nose is committed to smelling. Humans, on the other hand, only have about a square inch of their internal nose dedicated to the sense of smell. While the degree varies between breeds and the individual dog, it is thought that the dog's ability to smell is between 10x-100x greater than man's ability to smell!